


But We Can't Handle This Alone

by desperately_human



Category: Dublin Murder Squad Series - Tana French
Genre: Cassie is perfect and deserves every good thing, I wasn't sure how to tag it for realtionships and stuff, Not necessarily a happy ending, Rob makes ONE SINGLE wise decision and tells sam about how he's adam ryan, but as fixed as I could make the story i guess?, falls in the middle of the book, it's like sort of slashy but that's not necessarily how to read it, this is sort of just Rob and Cassie and Sam being toegther
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-25 14:54:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22497919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/desperately_human/pseuds/desperately_human
Summary: In that moment, I could feel that perhaps unraveling inside my head, lost focus for just a second and looked down into the cool, clear, blue water. How easy, I thought, to just let go. And once I thought it, how like the only solution it seemed.Rob and Cassie tell Sam the truth about the 1984 case and they  try to figure out what to do.
Relationships: Cassie Maddox/Rob Ryan
Comments: 7
Kudos: 13





	But We Can't Handle This Alone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cosmo_is_Beink_Melon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cosmo_is_Beink_Melon/gifts).



> Everything that happens in In The Woods in so clearly and exactly what is SUPPOSED to happen. I wanted to do some kind of fix-it happy ending but this is just about as fixed as I could make it. Hope it makes you smile.

There are few things where the giving away of them is more selfish than the keeping; secrets are one. It happened like it was always going to, with a simple question after a long day, on the worn couch of Cassie’s apartment with rain battering the windows, the one time I was too tired to lie.

‘But what about this Adam Ryan from the original case? Why haven’t we made more of an effort to find him?’

I was clinging to the rough cliff face, miles over the water. I couldn’t remember a time when my fingertips weren’t raw and bleeding from grasping at the tiny cracks. The peak rose above me, all week I had been running on adrenaline, on that certainty that _just a little farther_ and I would reach the crest, haul my aching body over the precipice and lie in the sun on the other side. In that moment, I could feel that _perhaps_ unraveling inside my head, lost focus for just a second and looked down into the cool, clear, blue water. How easy, I thought, to just let go. And once I thought it, how like the only solution it seemed. And how foolish I had been to ignore it, to fight all these days, these years, when all it took was to unpry my aching fingers from the edge, just for one second, and fall away. To let the water wash off the blood and the lies and hold me. How easy to be forgiven.

Cassie shot me a look as I opened my mouth: she knew, too, that the second I poured out this secret into Sam’s hands it was over. No longer ours to cup safely, to protect, to hate and to cherish. Sam lived life sometimes with his eyes closed, but with his hands open—whatever he held he gave the world.

‘We already found him’ Cassie’s eyes held fear, her own hand raising slightly from her side as if she could catch the words in midair, crumple them up and stick them into her pocket. She didn’t understand yet, that beyond fear there was freedom. That falling was like soaring. That the solution to my cramped fingers and aching lungs was to just let go.

‘What--?’ Sam didn’t understand yet. He had always been the most innocent of us, in so many ways. I had a moment of second-thought, a desire to protect him from this one last truth.

‘Yeah,’ I thought, fuck it, there wasn’t a delicate way to say this, ‘it’s me. Adam Robert Ryan. At your service.’ I reached out a hand, as if in introduction. Absurdly, he shook it. We stared at each other. Minutes passed, and I could see the understanding working its way across his face, the truth settling in.

‘How are you working this case?!’ I couldn’t hear anger in his voice, although surely that would come. Right now was pure disbelief.

‘I know, alright. I should have said something at the start,’ I had asked for it, I knew I had, but I had also just put my whole life on the line and I didn’t need another self-righteous lecture from the man who had never even gotten a comma in a confession wrong. ‘Every piece of evidence I’ve touched is fucked. I _know_.’

‘No,’ Sam said, biting his lip in frustration, hand feather-light still holding mine, ‘I mean...how are you doing it? Your friends. You grew up there. I’d be a wreck. You’re doing...God.’

I stopped, unsure what to do with what looked like kindness. Cassie hadn’t shown this overt sympathy and thank heavens for that, just a simple ‘shit Rob’ with a brief silence, and then she stole a handful of chips off my plate and I smacked her arm and it was over. This was different. But I didn’t want to punch Sam the way I might have wanted to hurt anyone who looked at me with pity. There wasn’t pity here though, just...sorrow. Affection. It left me wrong footed on the shifting sands of my own emotions, unable to get a firm grip on anger but not quite ready for gratitude.

Cassie handed us each a cup of hot whiskey, then settled on my other side on the sofa, cradling her own cup in both hands and tucking knees up to her chest. We waited, all three of us, until through the honey-thickness of time that had settled around us I realized it was my turn to speak. ‘I just. Did.’ I answered Sam. I don’t think I can say that anything I do is ever truly devoid of artifice, to claim that would be denying an essential part of who I am, what makes me good at my job and occasionally kind of shit at being a person. But I would say I am at my most honest with Cassie, and when I answered I beyond seeking a goal. And so I believe I told the truth when I said

‘I didn’t think it mattered. It was our case. I thought we could handle it.’

‘But we can’t.’ Cassie said it so certainly, folding me and my massive fuck-ups into that _we_ just as she had done since the first day we walked in as partners. I loved her, in that moment, or maybe more accurately I had always loved her but there, in that room, I felt it with such a blazing, perfect certainty that I that it tore down my chest, sparked behind my eyes. I loved Sam, like a solid-sky backdrop to those dizzying flames, with his blind, unjustified faith in humanity and his fear for me. I wanted wrap us in paper and bottle us—Cassie’s strength and Sam’s compassion and my stupid, messy, useless love—and put us away on a high shelf somewhere where time would never pass and O’Kelly would never call us one by one into his office and the trees of Knocknaree Woods would never be splattered with blood.

Sam opened his mouth and even though I had started this, the clear certainty of the fall was gone and all I could see was a pebble shaken out of my blood-soaked shoe that day they found me alone and how in all these years of silence it had grown into a mossy boulder gathering speed down a hill, not caring how terribly small and powerless we all were before it.

‘We’ve got to—’ he lost his nerve, glanced mostly at Cassie to check for a reaction. ‘I mean,’ taking a breath, straightening his shoulders, ‘we need to tell someone.’

‘I know.’ I said. Sam visibly let out a breath. Cassie made a soft, awful sound, like something small with its leg in a trap, but when I turned my head her eyes were clear, her jaw clenched. ‘

I’ll say you didn’t know,’ I said to them. To Cassie.

‘Shut up, Ryan,’ she knocked my arm with her closed fist, knuckles digging in just enough to hurt, a genuine snap of anger underneath the teasing tone, ‘like anyone would believe that. Anyway, you wouldn’t dare.’

I caught her hand, fingers gripping her wrist. It was desperately important that she understand, ‘I would.’

The fire went out of her. She closed her eyes, physically sagged forward until her forehead brushed my shoulder. ‘We’ll deal with it,’ she said, muffled voice between her curls, ‘tomorrow we’ll deal with it.’

Sam shifted, I had almost forgotten he was there and he seemed to realize this as he stood to clean his glass at the sink. I missed the weight of him, solid, still. I didn’t know how to say it. Cassie lifted her head, and I hated myself for the tears glittering on her eyelashes, hated myself more for thinking they were beautiful.

‘Stay,’ she said, looking beyond me to Sam. He glanced up and she nodded. It was like and unlike every other night. Sam washed dishes while Cassie and I changed, Cassie threw him an extra t-shirt he held it uncertainly while she started laying sheets in the sofa.

The moments had a precarious beauty: I fished out the whiskeyed lemon from the bottom of my glass and sucked on it while I watched the soap bubbles dancing away from Sam’s hands. I caught my own rapt expression in the bathroom mirror and realized I was trying to memorize the taste of Cassie’s toothpaste. Even once he had changed Sam still looked ready to bolt for the door, his soft eyes at such odds with the I ONLY EAT VEGANS t-shirt Cassie had given him that I caught a bubble of laughter in my throat, swallowed it down as if I could save it for another day.

Somehow we settled, Sam on the couch and Cassie on her futon, slid over against the wall. She flipped the covers open, looking at me and then at the empty space beside her as if it was obvious. Maybe it was. I folded in beside her and flicked off the lamp. She curled against my side and I felt her breaths resound inside of me, my hand on her head, her back. In that soft darkness, with Cassie pressed up against me and Sam across that tiny room so close I could have touched his cheek with my fingertips, all of us frozen in the moment before the earth shattered, I was the least alone I have ever been.


End file.
